Teaching, Learning, and the Digital

Humanities and the Digital

According to Daniel Paul O’Donnell, “Humanities, Not Science, Key to New Web Frontier.” Citing the humanities background of several familiar web creators (Larry Sanger/Wikipedia, Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook, Michael Everson/Unicode), O’Donnell asserts that: “The Internet is no longer primarily an engineering problem. Its basic technological building blocks have been in place for 20 years. What is new is how this technology is being used…The significant thing about the new digital economy is not its technology, but its applications…
The humanities and social sciences are important to the new digital economy not simply because they help people think about technology in new ways. They are also directly responsible for some of the fundamental protocols that allow this technology to function.”